Monday, July 14, 2014

I'm spinning like a dervish (well, a dervish who sneaks in 20-30 minutes with the wheel after work in the evenings) and having a blast with the Tour de Fleece. So far, I've managed to spin every day of the Tour. Yay! Naturally, my photographic evidence is scant - my only daytime shots are from last weekend and are making their way from my phone onto the computer while I type (along with several hundred other pics of this and that). Tomorrow is a rest day on the Tour and I'll poke around a bit to see if there is some fun way to show off my nighttime snapshots of spinning progress. A gif maybe?

But for now, I thought I'd share a few non-spinning delights. Ok, not too far removed from spinning, at least for this first one.

Pretty much as soon as the yarn was dry, Tadpole and I wound up my new polwarth/silk yarn. And I cast on the next day. Kuura is a delightful pattern to knit - interesting yet intuitive and not too busy. I'm flipping the main body and edging charts to have a lacier body to the shawl. We'll see how it looks in the handspun.

I feel like this is moving at a glacial pace but it's not quite that bad. Maybe more like tortoise speed. It would probably finish up more quickly if I didn't ignore it to play with my new handspun.

And, in non-knitting news, I have pumpkins!

Honest to goodness pumpkins in my backyard garden (ok, expanding onto the driveway, if I'm being really honest). That picture is a day old now and the little pumpkin was almost the size of my fist when I went to check on it this evening.

I've got some handspun calling my name before it's time to turn in for the night so I'll just leave you with this shot of our garden visitor hanging out with the zucchini.

Sunday, July 6, 2014

Sitting down at my spinning wheel last month proved much more fun than I'd hoped. The polwarth/silk blend was a dream to spin and exactly what I needed to get back into the groove with my wheel. So, in a typical fit of ambition, I decided to join the Tour de Fleece this year.

I have a bump of 12 oz of Briar Rose Fibers BLF top that will be perfect for my goal of spinning every day of the Tour. And I have my team in place to cheer me on:

We dropped our cable subscription ages ago so I was thrilled to see that you can download an iPad app to watch the Tour de France. Tadpole and I watched today's stage streaming live while I spun this morning.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before I could spin the BFL, I had to finish up my polwarth/silk blend. Nothing like a holiday weekend (and a baby who naps reasonably well, not to mention a three-year-old inspired to nap, too, by the prospect of staying up late to watch fireworks) to make the time to finish up spinning and plying that fiber braid.

This is the first handspun yarn that I've wanted to start knitting up as soon as it came off the niddy noddy.